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Monday, 28 August 2017

He's Baaaaa-ack

Hi, my name is Mike, and I'm back. Big thanks to friend Gordon for keeping the lights burning here at TOP while I was away.

I went to Cambridge, where my mother and stepfather live.

It is neither fitting nor fair that my dear Mom should suffer the depredations of dementia. For most of her life she was a woman who loved to be organized, in touch, and in control—the master, or should I say mistress, of events, households, schedules, and the warp and woof of full and active lives—her own and others. If you wanted to know some detail of family history or the latest news about any family member or friend, she's who you would ask; she had the orbits and activities of a large cast of characters catalogued in her mind. Now she struggles sometimes to place the names of her own grandchildren. Last Summer at this time, she would repeat, "this damned dementia! I hate it!" This visit, she would look at me curiously and say, "Now wait—tell me, what is 'dementia'?" She is heartbreakingly still herself, and tragically not.

iPhone portrait of Pearl, my mother's daytime caregiver. An entrepreneur with a growing business, Pearl was born in Ghana and grew up in the Netherlands.

I was supposed to stay with her while my stepfather, her main caregiver, went to Italy to visit his daughter in Rome. But my stepfather collapsed just prior to his departure with a heart irregularity, and spent the week in the hospital instead. Not at all what he had planned or wanted. I traveled to Cambridge anyway, to lend support. It's a challenging time for all concerned, with too many things up in the air.

A new Fuji you've never seenWhile there, however, I got to have lunch with sagacious and wise Oren Grad, who lives in nearby Wellesley, which, for your information, is between Natick and Needham. You might recall that Not-So-Stately Oren Manor in Wellesley is the location of the Large-Format Camera Museum and Graveyard. Oren is the holder of thirteen scholarly degrees and an M.D. (I exaggerate, but only ever so slightly). He speaks or reads Hebrew, English, French, and Japanese, and has lately embarked on acquiring Finnish (all true—here, I do not exaggerate). My father once admiringly described a scientist colleague at NASA by saying "he thinks thoughts all the time you and I never think"—which I could say of Oren.

To give you a brief idea of Oren's mental horsepower, on Saturday I gifted him an e-book—a full-length book about nutrition written by a doctor and researcher that spans 354 pages in the print version. Amazon reported that the gift had been accepted a little after one in the afternoon. Early the next morning, at six-something, I had in my inbox Oren's long, detailed analysis of the book, complete with citations. He had read it between loads of laundry the previous afternoon, and composed and written his astute and articulate response before the poor Earth had struggled to complete one full revolution. Imagine the intensity of the man's intellectual focus when he actually tries.

Oren in action with the RodenFuji InstaxStock (?)

...But he's a photo-dawg, just like the rest of us. At lunch, he promised to show me a brand new Fujifilm camera I had never seen before—and he delivered! He pulled from his bag a Fuji Instax Wide 300 ($87.75 new) modified by having its lens removed and replaced with a 100mm Rodenstock Sironar-N view camera lens. Although the film is inherently low-resolution, he says the better lens makes a quite noticeable difference when the exposure is just right.

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. slowly emerging from blankness, which is a good way to summarize today, too

Which might be beside the main point, which is that the hybrid is quirky, fun, and unique.

Butterrrrrs!Next stop, Rochester, to pick up the doggies—and then I'll have one more post to put up this afternoon tomorrow [sorry], a lovely piece from Carl Weese, who happens to be one of Oren's oldest friends. (We all met on the old CompuServe Photo Forum, which dates us in Internet eras.)

Check back for more later!

It's good to be back.

Mike(Thanks to Gordon and Oren)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Richard Szmyd: "Hi Mike, Can you let us know what the nutrition book was? It's a subject I am very interested in. Thanks."

Mike replies: Hi Rich, it was Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, by T. Colin Campbell and Howard Jacobson. Oren was critical to the point of scorn (I dutifully report) but I find a lot of value in some of the ideas and I find it courageous that Campbell attempts to articulate his thinking while knowing it's neither conventional nor easy to defend. My own feeling is that nutrition science is currently in a primitive state, similar to, say, anatomy before William Harvey or epidemiology before John Snow. Despite that, we must eat!

Illkka: "I wonder if you really need to say 'iPhone portrait of Pearl...'. I know this is a photography website, but still. Would you say 'Hasselblad portrait'? Maybe you would. But is it really necessary? Nice portrait, by the way."

Mike replies: Thanks, and the iPhone question probably worth a whole post. But I think that, as you guessed, I would indeed say "Hasselblad portrait" if I thought the information was pertinent. I guess it depends on my seat-o'-the-pants sense of what the typical reader is likely to be interested to know, nothing more rigorous than that.

Dave Levingston (partial comment): "Oh...and welcome back. Missed you, but Gordon did well while you were away."

Mike replies: Indeed.

Dave Karp: "I have never met Oren, but he is a darn nice guy. He has been very generous in his assistance and advice to me (just another photographer who sometimes uses a sort-of resurrected large format film size). Always very appreciated."

Mike replies: He has been invaluable to TOP over the years, too, mostly behind the scenes. He is indeed an extremely helpful person by nature and you're right, very appreciated.

It's worth mentioning that Oren is a big part of the reason that TOP exists at all. In 2005 I was putting together a website to collate my various photo-related activities, and I had an extra tab in the template I was using. Oren suggested, "Why not start a blog?" and I answered, "What's a blog?" Blogs were hot at the time and Oren was reading something like 150 of them every day (as my story above suggests, he's a natural speed reader) and was getting most of his news, collectively, from them. So he educated me about blogs, I decided to shift The 37th Frame from paper-by-subscription (itself modeled on David Vestal's GRUMP) to online-and-free, and the rest is history. (The website I was building back then was never made public, by the way.)

Please tell me more about that modified Instax. Did Oren do it himself, or is it possible to buy one somewhere? I'm getting close to the end of my stash of peel-apart Fuji instant film. I have a Mamiya Universal camera to shoot that stuff with. But I'd really like to find an Instax camera that actually has a decent lens...manual exposure controls would be dandy too.

Damn, did we have this conversation already? While you were hanging in the Compuserve Photo forum, I was Chief Sysop of the MacUser Magazine forum, and also hanging out a lot in the Movies forum with the likes of Roger Ebert.

The great thing about being a sysop was not the monthly stipend, but the fact that the Compuserve fee was waived. When I first started, if I remember, it was $21 an hour (!), so the money saved by free access added up to much more than the stipend.

Mike,
Welcome back home, and I'm sorry to hear about your Mom. At 75 myself, I've already seen dementia's effects on various (older) members of my extended family. It's perhaps rougher on the care givers, but distressing regardless of which side of the condition you're on.

Anyway, here's a wave from across the lake. Big family gathering this week, we got in Saturday, and leaving this coming Saturday. Give a shout if you're open for a drop-in. I think you already have my email, from earlier communications.

Welcome back ! My family spent last week in not-quite-your-neck-of-the-woods (the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks ... I had considered a trip out to the Finger Lakes and Letchworth State Park, but it would have required too much driving from place to place to see all I wanted to see). On the way home from our trip, I gave my daughter and her friend a twin pack of Fuji Instax film so they could each print some pictures from the trip (I'd packed her Instax printer).
The little prints have a certain charm to them, even though the quality is relatively lousy. On the way home, we stopped at a craft & antique fair, where I picked up a little souvenir pack of wallet-sized b&w pictures from Ausable Chasm (a place we visited). Those little, old pictures were also charming. And while in Saranac Lake, we visited the studio of a photographer, where I bought a poster of a photo he took with a Fuji 617. But I noticed a few prints he had on display that consisted of 4 small images on a roughly 3x10" paper. I found those charming, too. I'm starting to like small prints.
Neither here nor there, but I figured between upstate NY and Fuji, it was somehow relevant.

Oh dear, sorry about your mom, that sounds rough. I don't even know what to wish for you, other than the strength and balance to carry on gracefully through this time.

I found those as primary care giver for my mother, but it may have been easier, as her slow deterioration was all physical until the very last few weeks. Even then, it was not dementia or Alzheimer's, just what might be called a loss of interest in the doings of life.

Ok, lets see, a $90 dollar Instax camera and kilo buck view camera lens and don't forget the $700 helical so it can be focused. Good grief, is this fellow made of money? I was thinking of hacking up a similar combo but was intending to use a 105mm f4.5 3 element Kodak lens from a Tourist II 6X9 folder. No need for a helical, it has front element focusing to 3.5 feet. Should be plenty of resolution for the not enlarged instant print.

Sorry to hear about your mother - I've been where you're at. I strongly advise you to sit down with your mother as soon as possible with every question you can come up with about your family's history. Ask her for her memories as they will soon be lost. Bring family photos and ask for the stories behind them. Get as much info as you can. How I wish I'd done this before my parents departed.

Alzheimer's took my parents' minds and lives, and I think it will come for mine one day, as well.

I sat with my mother three evenings a week for 3 years giving the same, and sometimes, nonsense answers to repeated questions. When she stopped noticing the nonsense questions, I knew things had gotten worse.

Despite the frustrations caused by the thickening mental fog, she seemed somewhat content most of the time. Despite that, it is still is not a way I would choose to go.

Interesting how many people who take care of the elderly in the United States are from Ghana. I suppose that is partly a reflection of Ghana's English-speaking heritage, but I also think it reflects the deep sense of family and community and sharing that seems to be built into the country's culture. My father's live-in caregiver during the last years of his life was Ghanaian. She eventually began refusing to take the ‟required” vacations provided by the agency that employed her because the old man had difficulty adjusting to the replacements they sent. My siblings and I are still in contact with her; we consider her a member of the family.

CompuServe Photo Forum! Boy, does that bring back memories. Dates me, too. And I still have some useful threads from the Forum, that I've saved on my hard drive. And get this: I was a subscriber to your 37th frame at about that time.

Dementia is a sad fact of aging for some, however not for others. Your mother's physical body will deteriorate after her passing, her memory shall not. That noted as has been suggested above,
speak with your mother frequen and enquire of her the history of your family 'cause once she is gone, she will no longer be a resource.

In my own case my father died suddenly of a brain tumour at age 62, Mum died of the effects of dementia at age 94. So figure I am somewhere in between. Hence am labelling and distributing all of my slide images now, while I am still mentally and yes physically able. Afterwards, so be it what ever.

You may wish to read my comments to your locum's posting(s); he did a wonderful job whilst you were on vacation.

When someone says nutrition I almost think astrology. Nutritional science is about as scientific as economics :)

I read the Chinese study (almost entirely) by Campbell and while there are some decent ideas, I can't help but realize that not everything works the same for everyone. There is most certainly not a one single best answer/diet.

[That is certainly true, but there are certainly some identifiable bad diets. The standard American diet (SAD) is by now known to be a factor, to varying degrees, to the five "diseases of affluence": heart disease, cancer, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes. Another claim I read recently is probably also true: many Americans, especially poorer ones, eat a worse diet than the SAD! Maybe they should call that the SSAD, for sub-standard American diet. [g] --Mike]